Tag: Star Trek

Trump, the Anti-Obama, Ends in Tyranny

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Khan in “Star Trek.”  A strong leader if you don’t mind tyranny

W.J. Astore

My wife, who knows how to cut to the chase, pointed out a big aspect of Trump’s appeal to me this morning: “Trump is the anti-Obama.”

Think about it.  When it comes to their personal qualities, it would be hard to envision two men who are such polar opposites.  Consider Obama.  He’s cool.  Rational.  Analytical.  A thinker.  He’s also polite, cautious, and considerate.  He’s a skilled writer and a poised, often inspirational, speaker.  He’s at pains to broadcast a message of inclusiveness.  He’s all about diversity and tolerance and embracing those who are different.  He’s also by all accounts a loyal family man, a loving husband and father, with a strong marriage.

Consider Trump.  Everything I just said about Obama is the opposite for Trump.  Trump is emotional.  Flamboyant.  Given to knee-jerk responses.  A man of action.  He appears to be impolite, impetuous, and inconsiderate.  Near as I can tell, Trump’s books are ghost-written, and his speaking style is bombastic and inflammatory rather than poised and inspirational. Promoting divisiveness rather than inclusiveness, his message of “making America great again” is read by some of his supporters as making America white-male-dominated again. Hardly a loyal family man, he’s on his third marriage, the previous two ending acrimoniously, and if you credit his boasts caught on tape he was trying to cheat on his current wife while they were still newlyweds.

Now, which one of these men is more desirable as a role model?  The loyal husband and family man, the one who embraces diversity and brings people together?  Or the disloyal husband, the one who boasts of sexual encounters, who objectifies women, the one who rejects tolerance for rhetoric that drives intolerance?

It’s sobering to see self-styled conservative or evangelical Christians, who claim they are all about family values and the sanctity of marriage, twisting their professed beliefs to embrace Trump and reject Obama.  Certainly, in some cases racism is involved here, a sense that Obama is “not one of us,” whereas Trump, with all his glaring flaws of character and behavior, is accepted as the imperfect guy who’s “just like me” (or perhaps just like a black sheep of the family).

Here’s another way of looking at it if you’re a “Star Trek” fan: Trump is Captain Kirk to Obama’s Mr. Spock.  In his coolly logical manner, Obama has often been compared to Mr. Spock.  And Trump as Captain Kirk: it seems to work, since Kirk was a man of action, often emotional, a womanizer, sometimes intemperate.

But this is to insult Captain Kirk.  More than anything, Kirk was a leader: a man who brought a diverse crew together and made them better.  Yes, he could be intemperate, but he had a capacity for personal growth.  Smart, tough, and experienced, Kirk was a ladies’ man, but he wasn’t married and never forced himself on women (with the notable exception of “The Enemy Within” episode, in which Kirk is split in two, his hyper-aggressive twin given to attacking women for his own pleasure).

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In “The Enemy Within,” a hyper-aggressive Kirk “twin” sees nothing wrong with sexual assault

In Trump you’re not getting Captain Kirk, America.  You’re getting a one-dimensional “evil” Kirk, or perhaps a Khan Noonien Singh, another “Star Trek” character (played memorably by Ricardo Montalbán), a tyrant and ruthless dictator, a man who believes it’s the right of the strong to take or do whatever they want.  (So-called Alpha Male behavior, according to one of Trump’s sons, though I prefer a different A-term: Asshole Male.)

Some of Trump’s success, at least initially, came from the fact he was a powerful contrast to Obama, the anti-Obama, if you will.  And the “anti-” was more than symbolic, considering how Trump drove the birther movement and its false narrative of how Obama was illegitimate as president.  And I can understand after eight years the desire among many for a “Captain Kirk” after two terms of “Mr. Spock.”

But Trump is much more Khan than Kirk.  He’d embrace Khan’s motto that “Such [superior] men [like me] dare take what they want.”  But a man who believes in his own inherent superiority — that his might will make right — is not a leader.  He’s a tyrant. And tyranny is the very opposite of democracy.

U.S. Foreign Policy: Too Much Captain Kirk–and William Shatner

Fire those phasers, America!
Fire those phasers, America!

W.J. Astore

Much of our foreign policy is driven by fear–fear that if we don’t act, whether in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere–the bad people there will thrive, after which they’ll come for us in the good old USA.  Most of us will recall George W. Bush’s saying, “We’ll fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here.”  But what if constantly fighting them “over there” is a guarantee of blowback right here in Homeland USA?

As one of my conservative friends (Yes – I have them!) says, “If they (the enemy) stay over there, I’ll airlift knives, forks, and condiments to them.”

Well, we’ll never know unless we try.  Call the cavalry home, America.  Send in the cutlery and condiments. And let’s see what happens.

OK, call me an isolationist.  All these American machinations in and deployments to the Middle East and Africa – paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck, to me they aren’t worth the bones of a single Pennsylvanian grenadier.  Isn’t the Middle East of today roughly the equivalent to the Balkans of c.1910?  Except for the oil, why bother with Iraq and Iran?  Radical Islam is no picnic, but a direct threat to the USA?  Come on.  If we leave, my bet is radical Islam will burn itself out.

Our constant interventions in the Middle East merely fan the flames of radicalism there, except when we throw fuel on the fire by sending lots of weapons or burning a Koran or wiping out (accidently, of course) another convoy of civilians with Hellfire missiles.  If we’re the enemy’s “Great Satan,” let’s leave and see how they do in a paradise without the US serpent in it.

The problem is that our foreign policy “experts” are subservient to national and international (corporate and financial) interests (among others), and those interests, along with their own hubris, make it impossible for them to order strategic withdrawals, much less imagine them.

Put briefly, our experts see the world as a stage (or as a staging area for military forces), upon which the USA must play the leading role.  They believe that if we don’t occupy that stage, and dominate it, some other country will, e.g. China will take over Africa.

The US military, meanwhile, favors “proactive,” forward-leaning, can-do, spirit.  The mentality is: We must act, or someone else will.  And our way of acting is necessarily a military way, since that is what our nation favors–and funds.

For my fellow “Star Trek” fans, the U.S. government is like the aggressive, action-driven Captain Kirk (even better: the bombastic, scene-hogging William Shatner), but without Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy at his side to provide cool logic or warm compassion.  So all we get is warp drive and phasers (or lots of histrionic overacting and scene-stealing, a la Shatner).

We can do better, America.  Let’s start by calling the cavalry home.  Cutlery and condiments to the fore!

Remember Color-Coded Threat Warnings?

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W.J. Astore

Back in the ancient time of 2007, you may recall that color-coded threat warnings were constantly appearing on our TV screens.  Those “Homeland Security threat advisory ratings” fluctuated between yellow (elevated) and orange (high).   With the lone exception of the State of Hawaii in 2003, the threat ratings never dropped to blue (guarded) or (heaven forbid) green (low).

It was like we were in an old Star Trek episode with Captain Kirk, stuck on a bridge that’s constantly on Yellow Alert, phasers and photon torpedoes locked on target.

Thankfully, the Department of Homeland Security finally ditched the color-coded warnings.  But have we ditched the mentality that drove them?  Are we not encouraged still to be afraid?

Yes, terrorism remains a threat.  I’m sure there’ll always be terrorists of some sort who seek to harm us.  But we’ve made a lot of progress in the so-called global war on terror.  We killed Osama Bin Laden.  We devastated Al Qaeda.

Indeed, as we teeter on the brink of national financial default, one of the bigger threats we seem to face is our own divided and ineffectual government.  While it appears a last-minute deal is in the works, it’s one of those “solutions” that just kicks the can down the road a few months.  We’ll doubtless be dealing with the same governmental gridlock — the same hostage-taking — after the New Year.

Hmm: Maybe we should revive that color-coded warning system.  But let’s apply it, not to the terrorists outside our borders, but to our own politicians who continue to threaten us with financial default and societal ruin.

If they continue to insist on taking our government hostage, throwing people out of work, and threatening us all with financial collapse, I’d say that rates at least an “orange” rating.  And if they persist in shooting the hostage (that’s us), I’d say that counts as a “red.”

Come on, Homeland Security!  Protect us from those who’d destroy our government.  Or are you shut down too?